Green Aria: An Opera for Your Nose

June 6, 2009— -- This week I attended a rather extraordinary event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City: a scent opera. It is, remarkably, just what it sounds like: an "opera" to be smelled rather than watched.

The work is the brainchild of Stewart Matthew, a financier, and Christophe Laudamiel, a mohawk-wearing chemist-turned-perfumist who thinks of fragrance as a high art.

And why shouldn't it be? We already tell stories through words, paintings, music and dance; why not through scent as well? After all, olfaction, a largely unexplored sensory territory, is more tightly neurologically bound to memory and emotion than any of our other senses.

To craft the opera, Matthew laid the scaffolding with a libretto, which sketched the somewhat amorphous plot, moods and characters that make up Green Aria. Then he turned to Laudamiel to custom-design scents for the piece's 35 characters – a project that took him several years to complete.

Meanwhile, composers Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson worked together to create the opera's music, smell by smell.

Recalling their process during a panel discussion, Muhly describes the first time they opened a jar of "Funky Green Impostor", one of the opera's more comedic characters. "It was one of the most intense experiences of my existence," Muhly said. "I realized this was a whole new game."

The most difficult part, Laudamiel explained, was figuring out how to deliver the smells to the audience.

First, there was the question of how to make sure each audience member received the same intensity of smell at the exact same time. That would have been impossible had the scents merely drifted around the room.

Instead, Matthew and Laudameil worked with Fläkt Woods, a ventilation company, to design and manufacture a "scent organ". From the centralized organ, the scents travel to each individual auditorium seat. The seats were then rigged with a thin, flexible "scent microphone" that an audience member could position as close to, or as far from, their nose as they pleased.